3 posts tagged “gothic funk”

Here I am saying The Slip is the best Nine Inch Nails album since the first one when I haven't really listened to any of them since Broken.  So I've been trying to catch up, going from recent to older; Year Zero and With Teeth are actually better than I thought, but neither are reach-out-and-grabby like The Slip, and both suffer from album bloat.  I am especially impressed with the opener from With Teeth, "All the Love in the World," which starts with a dub beat before morphing into a piano ballad (with falsetto, even!) and then finally an arena rocker:

Trent is relentless with his morbidly dour lyrics, though; it becomes overbearing after a while.  I think I can place them all into three categories:

1. I have low self-esteem.
2. We live in a dystopia.
3. Living in a dystopia has given me low self-esteem.

Did I miss anything?  What would Nine Inch Nails sound like if fronted by, say, Tom Waits and his morbidly gleeful lyrics?  Like this, I bet:

This song contains one of my all-time favorite weird couplets:

Turn the dust out, oh clear a way
When the injury swells up, it will not be contained

Yeah!  What the hell does that mean?  I don't know, but it sure is catchy!  Peter Hope first emerged in 1983 as the lead singer for The Box, a Sheffield band made up of former ClockDVA members.  Mick Fish give some details in his book about Cabaret Voltaire, Industrial Evolution:

The Box tried a number of singers, one who sort of whooped like a Red Indian chief but couldn't sing in tune. They even played two gigs with Mal [Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire] on vocals -- a marriage of styles that was quite successful in its own way.... The Box eventually advertised for a singer. By far the best response came from Pete Hope from Hertford. Vocally somewhere between Tom Waits and Howlin' Wolf, he moved up to Sheffield with his young family.

Hope's inventive lyrics and unbridled singing style perfectly complemented The Box's no-wave skronk.  Although they released several records, The Box never broke out, and they disbanded in 1985.  Peter Hope then embarked on a series of one-off collaborations: this EP with synth whiz David Harrow (now known as James Hardway), an album with Cabaret Voltaire's Richard H. Kirk, an album with Jonathan S. Podmore (now known as Jono Podmore a.k.a. Kumo), and a 12" single with studio engineer Mark Estdale as Chain:

I just adore that gothic-industrial-funk sound; if only that had caught on in the way Nine Inch Nails did.  Maybe it'll come back... Peter Hope, where are you?

Do you ever get a song in your head, that maybe you haven't heard for years, but it won't go away and you just have to dig it out and listen to it again?  Sure you do.  I've had this symptom this week for "Beat Me 'Til I'm Blue" by Colour Me Pop, an English band from the mid-80's who put out one single (on the misnamed American Phonograph label) and a few tracks on compilation albums.  The song has several of my favorite ingredients: prominent slap-bass, bongos, both male and female vocals, and a nice (but short) breakdown:

That doesn't qualify as Gothic in and of itself, but its presence on a Gothic-heavy compilation LP, Breaking the Back of Love, makes the connection.  And it's not far from some of the music that bona fide Gothic bands were creating at the time, most notably The Danse Society.  Now that I've brought them up in a slap-bass post I have to present their slap-bass song, "Sensimilla."  It was released as a bonus 12" with the club hit "Say It Again", in a gatefold sleeve.  (A double 12" in a full-color gatefold sleeve; all that packaging cost for just four songs?  That couldn't have been cost-effective, what was Arista thinking?)  This is bassist Tim Wright's shining moment, laying down a rubbery, funky groove that won't allow you to sit still (and by "you", I mean me), and Paul Nash's syncopated rhythm guitar does a great job to accent the flow.  The lyrics are on the embarrassing side (condensed version: "I love to smoke pot"), and I could do without the toasting from "Sooty" Brown (but I guess you have to have toasting in a marijuana song); but it's the funkiest song The Danse Society ever recorded, and therefore it's my favorite.

(I was all set to rip this myself, but it just turned up on New Romantic Rules, saving me the trouble.  NRR is an incredible source of 80s music; many of the obscure singles I've been holding onto have turned up in Rambul's amazing 20-volume Lost Hits compilation series.  Chances are if you have any favorite "lost" 80s songs, they're in there too.)

At the forefront of the 80s gothic funk bands was Brilliant, the band formed by bassist Youth (Martin Glover) after leaving Killing Joke in 1982.  (And they weren't the only one, I can think of about two more.)  If Wikipedia is to be believed, the band lineup on the 1983 "Colours" 12" is Youth and Guy Pratt on bass, Marcus Myers on lead vocal and guitar, and Andy Anderson and Peter Ogi on drums; no word on who played the keyboards (probably Youth) or who supplied the sexy moans and groans (probably not Youth).

The sleeve design is by Mark Manning, who would later team up with Jimmy Cauty (of the final incarnation of Brilliant) , adopt the nom de musique Zodiac Mindwarp and spearhead the "grebo" fad.  (The art itself is not by Manning, but Gustave Doré.)  Brilliant became a Uriah Heep-like revolving door for musicians, which didn't stop them from putting out a string of great singles.  When their album deal was announced I was overjoyed, because that meant I'd be getting a whole bunch of new Brilliant songs all at once.  What a disaster that turned out to be.  I can demonstrate exactly what went wrong, but later; right now I'm grooving on what went right.